This is our game project. The name is pro temp and is subject to change. There is probably already an IP out there bearing asimilar enough name to warrant our changing it.

The concept was born from our desire to play games cooperatively. We have played most coop games that have been published in recent years. Yet we wanted more, and we were seeking a specific type of game. Having played most of the “big” MMOs, we were looking for something similar to the dungeon crawling you find in them, without the overhead of persistent worlds – getting around, finding companions, etc – and the difficulty in finding original content.

Take for example World of Warcraft or Age of Conan, two recent and in the case of the former, very popular, adventure MMOs. Dungeons are predictable and simple in concept, and they never change. The experience is always the same, the only difference being what “drops” are earned and the people you play with. What we want to create is an experience where you have character improvement of the same type as MMOs in general, with some tweaks, and multiplayer dungeon crawling. The difference is that we want to have randomly generated dungeons and scaling content, along with an optional central character store.

Random Dungeons

The concept of random content generation is not new. It is quite old in fact with Dungeon Hack doing it over a decade ago. We are seeking the same goal, albeit with more recent technology. Server creators can choose themes for their dungeons, or mix and mash as long as the different themes can connect to each other.

Procedural Content

We also want to procedurally generate the encounters that players run into in the game. Procedural generation is not random generation. Not quite, anyway. Procedural implies rules, procedures, for generating the content. Thus content will scale to the desires of the players. A player can create a dungeon with settings that generate very easy through inordinately hard content for the players to overcome, all set with sliders on server creation. Server creators can also choose different themes for dungeons they instance.

Loot, containers, traps, NPCs etc are also generated based on the settings on the server and the difficulty of the encounters. The very best loot will be generated on servers with extremely high power levels of players along with the largest and most complex encounters.

Central Character Store

Other features we want to include are “authenticated” characters, where dedicated servers communicate with a central character server which stores character information. Thus players can be assured their compatriots are playing characters that are “legal”. Of course there is no inherent limitation on what players can do with their own servers. If they want to cheat they are free to do so, on their own dedicated servers or otherwise. There are no plans to enforce any sort of policy across servers, nor do we have any desire to do so.

On hold

We’ve decided to put this project on hold for now, instead using VoidEngine in a more limited scope space action shooter. This will test the scripting interface and renderer, as well as the Physics engine to a limited degree, but will lower the number of assets and features that need to be implemented.